Bohumil Hrabal's entry into the English-speaking world might not have been as smooth as Milan Kundera's or Josef Škvorecký’s, but since the fall of state socialism in Czechoslovakia, his work has been eliciting relatively steady interest from Anglophone translators and publishers. Timothy West's rendering of Murder Ballads and Other Legends (Morytáty a legendy) is one of the latest additions to the long—but still not comprehensive—list that started with Edith Pargeter's 1968 translation of Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1965).

Murder Ballads and Other Legends is a collection of twelve short texts that provide a good overview of Hrabal's pre-1970s writing styles and techniques. These are intensely engaged with intertextual operations, which arguably pose the most significant challenge to the translator. Many of the pieces in the collection were appropriated and montaged from other, usually non-literary texts (these most explicitly include “A Ballad Written by My Readers,” “A Legend Played on Strings Stretched between Cradle and Coffin” and “Ballad of a Public Execution”) and several are earlier or later (or both) versions of other texts, as is the case with “The Legend of Cain,” which was based on a short story Hrabal wrote in 1949 and was one of the texts he used to write his Closely Watched Trains. Intertextual deepening and layering also spring from the use of different varieties of the Czech language, including the highly colloquial Common Czech.

The strategy West adopted in dealing with intertextual operations is in coherence with the commonly-applied approaches to translating such texts—he strove for an imitation of the heterogeneity of Hrabal's writing, but also made his own interpretations of the connections between the disparate textual fragments within his translation. The method—as an inevitable effect of prototypical translation procedures in general—increases the logicality of the work and corrodes the ecosystem that Hrabal's text forms with the materials from which it was appropriated. One approach that was not investigated by the translator was the imitation of the authorial method that can be considered an experimental form of translation, or, as Douglas Robinson more boldly proposes for all literary translation, a creation of a translation as a specimen of an imitative literary genre in which the writer-translator “takes as his or her secondary model the contents of the source text. . .and as her or his primary model the source author's strategies” (“What kind of literature is a literary translation?” Target 29 [2017], no. 3: 459). Such an approach would seem especially adequate with respect to texts like “A Legend Played on Strings Stretched between Cradle and Coffin,” which is a collage compiled from seven non-literary sources. An alternative translation strategy might use the montage method with parallel English language textual materials, while also considering—to an extent—the semantic potential of the Czech text.

Overall, West's rendition balances domesticating and foreignising elements to create a translation that is both accessible (owing to the various forms of explicitation employed) and marked by “otherness” (most pronouncedly through quotational words that denote culturally specific items). The translation might have profited from a more thorough revision, however,since some of the solutions are questionable and others outright wrong. Unnecessary semantic shifts of this kind range from simple lexical slips, such as “peacock” instead of “baboon” (8; the Czech contains “pavián,” which got probably mixed up with “páv”), to those more deeply woven into the text. An example of the latter is the deletion of the thematic anaphoric connector in the sentence from “The Legend of Cain” in which the main protagonist's physician, who later takes his own life, keeps enquiring about the details of his patient's suicide plan—the English sentence speaks about the main protagonist's treatment in hospital as follows: “He would sit on the sideboard of my bed and explain to me over and over the endless details of my care” (54). Notwithstanding these occasional lapses, the translation serves Hrabal well—it is both structurally consistent in its approach and attentive to detail, as can be manifested by numerous well-thought-out solutions, such as “X + O > xx. A hug and a kiss for the little miss” (81) for the Czech “P + P–R. Pac a pusu bez rámusu” (Morytáty a legendy [Praha, 1968, 145]). Timothy West's version of Morytáty a legendy can undoubtedly be enjoyed not only by Hrabal enthusiasts, but also the general reader.